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Re: Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost

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From: Brandon Keith Biggs
Date: Sep 13, 2017 3:19AM

Hello Bryan,

Did you document techniques that both you and Angela did that worked
particularly well and things you both did that didn't work as well?

This design paradigm is creating a screen reader friendly site first, then
updating the visual UX to be much better after the site has been developed.



What did you do from a technical standpoint? How did you design your
widgets so they could have visual styling most effectively applied? Did you
use any CSS to begin with? How detailed can one get the visual UI with CSS
before needing a redesign of the widgets?

Your experience is invaluable to helping blind front-end developers design
most effectively.



I'm not sure that 6 months of a visual developer's time is something most
blind people have access to, so it would be interesting if there were ways
to reduce this time through design of CSS classes and positioning of
widgets.



What your case study goes to prove is that screen reader accessibility is
much more fundamental to the initial design than visual accessibility is. I
would love to know what Angela's workflow looked like and where she did
most of her changes.



Thanks,

Brandon Keith Biggs <http://brandonkeithbiggs.com/>;

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 4:47 PM, Bryan Garaventa <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> In regard to Judith's original question:
>
> "I have been researching this topic, but couldn't find anything useful.
> I'd like some information on how much it would cost to perform assessment
> and remediation on a project versus using inclusive design at the
> wireframe. My goal is to find evidence that implementing accessibility at
> the start of a project is cheaper than going through evaluation and
> remediation."
>
> I can't provide direct information regarding monetary cost, however I can
> provide firsthand experience regarding time and effort expenditures that
> relate to your question.
>
> Back in 2009, I started building the AccDC API at WhatSock.com with the
> goal of creating an accessible framework and dynamic content rendering
> system that would start out being as accessible as possible from the
> outset, in one part to also prove that if you begin with a baseline state
> like this, that full customization and updating is infinitely easier and
> cheaper than trying to take a fully built system that is not accessible and
> attempting to force accessibility into it.
>
> Being blind though my visual design capabilities are somewhat lacking and
> the visual experience sort of sucked, so after a while of building most of
> the widgets and backend wireframes including the AccDC TSG and AccDC
> Bootstrap modules, the Accessibility Tree Training Guide, The ARIA Role
> Matrices, and Visual ARIA, I asked publically for help in restyling all of
> these things to make them visually more appealing.
>
> This is the opposite of where most frameworks and libraries are coming
> from, which is to go from a fully visual baseline and a desire to force
> them to become accessible. In contrast, I already knew that besides the
> normal bugs cropping up here and there, what I had built was already
> accessible to start with, so the issue here was to see if it were possible
> to take fully accessible widgets and fully customize them and to see how
> easy it would be to do this.
>
> This was no small task, the AccDC TSG archives alone have three versions,
> one powered by jQuery, another powered by MooTools, and another powered by
> Dojo, and all include mirror widgets for each that include hundreds of
> accessible widget wireframes, not counting the landing pages for the
> documentation which often makes use of these same widgets, plus the four
> different variants of WhatSock.com that includes versions powered
> separately by a standalone AccDC API version plus the other libraries
> mentioned above as testing mirrors, plus the same for the AccDC Bootstrap
> single page application that includes fourteen of these accessible widgets
> built into the landing page for testing when powered separately by all of
> the above libraries and frameworks as mirrors, plus the other educational
> resources like the Accessibility Tree Training Guide, ARIA Role Matrices,
> and Visual ARIA, all of which needed to be restyled individually. My point
> being, that this commitment would include remaking the visual layouts of
> thousands of differing combinations, and the testing of these combinations
> within different browsers across multiple devices ranging across both
> desktop and mobile.
>
> A brilliant visual designer named Angela Ricci volunteered to do this,
> which she accomplished in total within approximately six months. Her
> efforts are described in more detail in the article at:
> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-true-functional-
> accessibility-scales-credit-angela-garaventa/
>
> So regarding time cost to effort requirements, during the process of
> testing all of these widgets and interactive design patterns, she
> discovered approximately 4 JavaScript scripting issues, several suggestions
> to improve the visual experience, and introduced just a few places where I
> needed to update the accessibility scripting to make sure that the markup
> change matched the accessible usage of the feature. This last one mainly
> had to do with updating the skip links on the landing pages which was a
> simple fix.
>
> So the time that I required to spend personally in fixing the discovered
> issues that cropped up during the six months that she was changing all of
> the visual layouts and visual cross browser compatibility issues for all of
> these widgets as she was working on them, added up to approximately 2 days'
> work on my part. So as far as cost goes, that's about 2 days' worth of
> wages for me.
>
> In doing this, I proved that it is monumentally cheaper to update
> technologies that are already accessible to start with, than it is to
> totally revamp technologies that are not.
>
>
> Bryan Garaventa
> Accessibility Fellow
> Level Access, Inc.
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> 415.624.2709 (o)
> www.LevelAccess.com
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of Tim Harshbarger
> Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2017 5:29 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> That is a valid statement. It might be easy enough to redirect such a
> statement to a more meaningful discussion.
>
> It is cheaper to make apps insecure than it is to make them secure.
> It is cheaper to do no testing than it is to do testing.
> It is cheaper to provide no customer support than it is to provide
> customer support.
> It is cheaper not to develop web or native mobile applications than it is
> to develop them.
>
> Most people would disagree with the above statements. Why is that? That
> is because each of those things has a value beyond the doing. Testing for
> the sake of testing has no value. People value testing because of the
> value it provides afterwards.
>
> It is very likely to be cheaper not to include any alt text than it is to
> write alt text for images. That is also true for every other part of design
> and development work--and yet we do them.
>
> Since we agree that there is little value in doing a thing just to do it,
> it appears that the best way to determine whether or not we should be doing
> accessibility is to discuss what value accessibility has to us.
>
> And if you can get your audience to start discussing the value of
> accessibility to their organization, then I think you can start having a
> meaningful discussion that likely will lead somewhere.
>
> That doesn't mean they will start by agreeing with you. But if they do not
> agree, it helps to understand why they disagree if you have any hope of
> persuading them.
>
> Just a thought.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of Meacham, Steve - FSA, Kansas City, MO
> Sent: Monday, September 11, 2017 4:54 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> At the risk of sounding cynical, an argument can be made that literally
> doing nothing (pre or post implementation) may be cheaper than doing
> something (again, pre or post implementation). My experience is that
> organizations that are uninterested in doing the first tend to be just as
> uninterested in doing the second. Note I say "doing" rather than "talking
> about."
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of Tim Harshbarger
> Sent: Friday, September 08, 2017 12:40 PM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED> ; WebAIM Discussion List <
> <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> I think it is extremely tough to find stats specifically for accessibility
> or inclusive design.
>
> You should be able to find stats on how much it costs to fix defects at
> various stages of a project (including post-implementation). I can't
> imagine there is a reason why addressing accessibility defects would have a
> significantly different cost than other defects like usability,
> functionality, or security. However, you might need to persuade your
> audience that accessibility defects aren't really any different than any
> other defect when it comes to repairing them. They all require that people
> have some level of knowledge about that type of defect in order to be able
> to identify and fix them. The more competent their knowledge level, the
> easier it will be to identify and fix the defect.
>
> I think you should be able to prove that the cost of addressing defects in
> design and development are so much less than fixing them as part of
> remediation that there is no way you could ever run a remediation project
> for less than what it would have cost you to have addressed the defects
> during design and development.
>
> Also, you might want to find examples where "remediation" can't fix the
> problem. That is the remediation needed to fix some problems can involve
> completely redesigning something from scratch.
>
> Hopefully that helps somewhat.
>
> Thanks,
> Tim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of Judith Blankman via WebAIM-Forum
> Sent: Friday, September 08, 2017 10:54 AM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> Additionally, the argument might not be specific to inclusive design.
>
> I think the point of persuasion is to do things right the first time,
> which is what inclusive design leads to.
>
> From: "Blankman, Judith A." < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Date: Friday, September 8, 2017 at 8:52 AM
> To: " <EMAIL REMOVED> " < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> I would be very interested in what you find, JP. We all know the pain,
> just need evidence to persuade others.
>
> I have seen a graphic that illustrates the cost of defect fixing by stage
> that shows an increase 10 times exponentially.
>
> I reached out to my colleague about where he found it and others like it.
> The graphic he sent to me is from a book 'Software Engineering- by Barry
> Boehm.
>
> He suggests looking at the Software Engineering Institute. He also sent me
> this link: http://www.ieee.org/index.html and says that the IEEE
> standards drives the electronic/digital world.
>
> Best,
>
> Judith Blankman
>
>
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of JP
> Jamous < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Organization: Jepelsy
> Reply-To: " <EMAIL REMOVED> " < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Date: Friday, September 8, 2017 at 8:07 AM
> To: " <EMAIL REMOVED> " < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: [WebAIM] Remediation Cost Versus Inclusive Design Cost
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I have been researching this topic, but couldn't find anything useful. I'd
> like some information on how much it would cost to perform assessment and
> remediation on a project versus using inclusive design at the wireframe. My
> goal is to find evidence that implementing accessibility at the start of a
> project is cheaper than going through evaluation and remediation.
>
>
> Any help or references will be highly appreciated.
>
>
>
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